Only God could be so Human

“After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” (Luke 2:46-47)

These verses from the Gospel of Luke are part of a story about Jesus’ boyhood, and it’s the only account of Jesus boyhood that we get in the New Testament. Of the four Gospels, Mark and John begin with Jesus as an adult, and Matthew transitions from the nativity scene to adulthood with very little in between. Only Luke preserves any detail of Jesus’ life as a young man, and these details are relatively unspectacular.

Mary and Jospeh lose track of Jesus during their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They eventually track him down in the temple where He’s sitting at the feet of the clerics, asking questions. The teachers are impressed at the lad’s aptitude, and Jesus tells His parents that they should have known that this is where he would be.

This gives Mary plenty to think about. Even so, there’s no suggestion that life for Jesus and His family continued any differently from that point forward. No miracles took place. No words of wisdom were preserved. Jesus, presumably, continued with his apprenticeship as a carpenter.

My dad used to say that human imagination always fills in where details are lacking and, sure enough, between the late 2^nd and the 6^th centuries, multiple stories covering the childhood and adolescence of Jesus appeared. Most of them read like the chronicles of super-boy learning to control his other-worldly powers.

The stories are many and various, including:

• The boy Jesus turning some clay pigeons into real pigeons
• Jesus turning some recalcitrant playmates into goats, and then back into boys.
• Jesus lengthening a beam of wood to help Jospeh with a carpentry project.
• Jesus healing a boy from a deadly snake bite

These narratives read more like conjuring tricks, designed to entertain, than do the miracles recorded in the canonical Gospels. Even the story of the child cured from the snake bite includes a spectacular detail – namely, that the snake has to re-absorb the poison, causing it to burst!

If you want to read these stories in full, look up the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” and the “Arabic Infancy Gospel”, and you’ll get plenty more ripping yarns just like these. I can’t take them seriously. Even so, I believe they give us an important insight.

The fact that all these super-boy stories had to be composed to fill in the blanks suggests that the actual boyhood of Jesus wasn’t worth recording. If today’s Gospel story about Jesus in the temple was the most noteworthy thing that happened in His early life, Jesus’ first thirty years must have looked a lot like those of His peers.

This is worth reflecting on. If Jesus was truly the Son of God from birth, how did this express itself for the first nine-tenths of His life? If not in miracles, then in what? Was Jesus extraordinarily compassionate as a young man, or remarkably intelligent?

Whatever godlike qualities Jesus had, they must have equally been human qualities. Perhaps, as Leonardo Boff, suggested, Jesus was extraordinarily human – indeed, that only God could be as human as Jesus was.

“Only a God could be so human! Jesus, the man who is God – a human God and a divine human” (from Jesus Christ, Liberator, chapter 3)

We think of God and humanity as radically distinct and, at one level, this is obviously true. We are not God, and we will never be God. Even so, we bear God’s image (Genesis 1:27), and when God takes on humanity in Jesus, none of Jesus’’ human characteristics disappear. Jesus’ divinity is seen through His humanity, and not in spite of it.

This Sunday is the Feast of the Holy Family, where we celebrate the human family of Jesus – a family where divine love was fully lived out in the normal realities of daily life. As I wrote this, I could hear my two daughters quietly chuckling together in the adjoining bedroom. There is something of divine love in that laughter too. As Jesus expressed His divinity through our human reality, so we uncover divine love in our life together.

Our Sunday Eucharist

We celebrated another wonderful Eucharist last Sunday, and a big thank you to my dear friends, Andrew Madry and Doug Pyeatt, for joining me on the panel. We also had our beloved, Rev. Joy Steele-Perkins, with us, giving her reflection on Mary’s Magnificat live as we couldn’t get the pre-recorded version to play properly.

Yes, once again I had crazy technical problems getting my video to work. I’ve been trying to trouble-shoot the issues with the people from Streamyard but nothing is resolved. I’m guessing that our broadcast is either being hacked directly or that my computer has been given some sort of virus that’s causing the problem. Accordingly, I’ve taken the plunge and ordered a new computer. I’ll be picking it up today. God willing, this week’s broadcast will go off without a hitch. 🙏

The ‘shorts’ from last Sunday are below and are entirely watchable, even if the video of Joy and me isn’t syncing properly with the dialogue. If you scroll down to the end of this post you’ll find the video of our full discussion of the Gospel reading, and I’ve added Joy’s original pre-recorded homily separately. You can, of course, watch all our broadcasts on my YouTube channel and see the complete library of shorts, on the Sunday Eucharist Instagram page.